Of Kings and Gods

In 1888 Rudyard Kipling wrote The Man Who Would Be King, which would later be turned into a movie starring Sean Connery. It featured an adventurer who tried to claim a country for his own and was declared a god by its inhabitants after apparently being shot by an arrow but coming out unscathed. When he tries to claim a bride as his prize, however, she bites him and he bleeds, showing the lie and leading to his death. Marvel did a similar thing more than a century later with Thanos and his now famous “all that for a drop of blood” line:

The importance is not how much blood is drawn, but that blood can be drawn at all. As Arnold Schwarzenegger said in Predator: if it bleeds, we can kill it. In…